During its first year of publication, Sports Illustrated sent a pair of staff writers to Florida to cover Major League Baseball's spring training. Nearly three weeks later, they sent only four words.
Not much happening here.
Fifty years after being penned, those four words still prove an insufficiency for covering the beautiful game, but another quartet of baseball words is so powerful as to make grown men twist their newspapers and cry tears of joy.
Pitchers and catchers report.
Beginning this Saturday - Valentine's Day, appropriately enough - battery mates for many of baseball's 30 squads will arrive in Arizona or Florida, carrying with them more golf clubs than bats or gloves, worried more about handicaps and backswings than sliders and strikeouts.
Their mere presence, though, will spur this country's baseball beat writers to follow every move, checking motions and deliveries and snooping around to see who is taping what in the trainer's room.
It is precisely because of this preseason wait, however, that I am sure this will be the year the Indians break their spell of championship-less seasons. The Tribe has not hoisted a World Series trophy to the air since 1948. They came close to winning the pot in 1995, closer still two years later, but it is now, in 2004, that they will finish the job.
I know it.
Everything, in fact, points to Cleveland's winning the World Series this season. Don't believe me? Listen to this evidence.
The American League's Central Division is MLB's weakest, featuring the Royals, Twins, White Sox, and, of course, Tigers, who challenged baseball's all-time single-season loss record until the final day of the 2003 season. This rather unimposing roster points to the Indians easily winning the division, say, about two weeks before Labor Day.
Having breezed through the regular season with weeks to rest their key players, the Indians will sweep the wearier Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, who will have battled one another 19 times between April and September, advancing to the World Series after playing just seven postseason games. The Chicago Cubs, meanwhile, will toil in the National League's Division and Championship Series, setting themselves up for disaster, as they have during every season since 1908.
When the Indians finally meet those Cubs in the Fall Classic, they will dominate them, chasing Chicago aces Mark Prior and Kerry Wood from the mound in every start. Needless to say, Cleveland will sweep again, resulting in the most successful postseason run in baseball history.
Of course, at this very moment, fans of every other team are having thoughts of this being the year their boys will win it all.
They hope more than anything else right now, because hope is all baseball fans can do in February. More than eight months and 2,500 games will pass before another champion is crowned, and for now, at least, folks in Arizona and Florida can echo those Sports Illustrated writers and utter those four unprintable words, Not much happening here.
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Matt LaWell
